As many have observed for some time now, SEO has completely changed over the past few years. From being machine-centric, it became people-centric. But what does it mean concretely to content marketers?

5 Web Design Implications - Marty NoteLove this post and infographic from @Scoop.it and @Guillaume Decugis because it makes a complex subject easy to understand. Let's extend the logic and think about how the new SEO changes how we design websites:

* Curation - Content Curation builds online community and the new SEO is all about your TRIBE so design in "Facebook-wall-like" visuals, create User Generated Content galleries, contests and games. * Creation - Must write to ENGAGE now not just appeal to spiders, so long form may make sense BUT less of it (lower creation frequency vs. curation). * Collaboration - social shares and confirmations matter don't talk to yourself about yourself so build collaboration into your designs.

* Design In An ASK - everyone needs everyone now so make sure our designs include an ASK (for collaboration and advocacy).

While many design trends are fleeting, a select few are natural evolutions of the industry. As the range of devices on which we view websites continues to grow,

Our Notes

1. Typography Will Be Flexible (agree).

2. The Decline of Web Coding (disagree, after spending a few weeks at The Iron Yard learning CSS & Java feels like CODE is going up not down, but we understand the point since it is possible to do a lot with templated WordPress these days).

Google trends helps redesign websites. We used Google Trends to understand headphones category for the Moon-Audio.com redesign launched the day after Valentine's Day. We share trends tips on how to use this powerful FREE tool in this 3 minute video and Curagami post.

Ecommerce Master Class: Conversion MetricsThere are only a handful of ways to increase sales from a website. Good idea to START with increasing your conversions since sending more traffic into a leaky boat is a fool's errand.

In this short Ecommerce Master Class Video we share three of our favorite tactics to increase conversion:

* Ubiquitous Free Shipping. * Best Sellers. * Reviews.

As you design your next website make sure you DESIGN IN these three ideas and your site will convert better. Conversion is a magic number too. Tiny improvements in conversion create HUGE benefits to your bottom line as costs go down and profit go up.

Websites don't age well. Sooner than you think it's time for a web redesign, but don't forget the 5 CSFs (Critical Success Factors) shared here.

5 Critical Success Factors For When Your Web Redesign

Start with Why.

Listen to customer votes

Test if you can, jump in if you can’t.

5 Easy to forget things.

Prepare for rain, hope for sun.

This post features behind the scenes notes from our http://www.Moon-Audio.com redesign. Picture above is a "Before" and "After" view of Moon Audio's website. We spent a lot of time working on the site's information architecture.

We spent so much time because we have a lot of customer data now thanks to Google Analytics. We used that data to find the 80-20 rule and kept that finding in mind as we changed site navigation and categories.

This kind of "What Business are we In" work goes to the first two bullet point - Start with Why and Listen To Customer Votes. Another goal, not stated in the Curagami post, was to create an immediate sense of "I'm in the right place" scenttrail.

Ecommerce, especially in popular categories such as #headphones and #electronics, have two kinds of sties. One site is informational making money from passing customers over to sellers. Cnet.com is an example of a content site making money by capturing attention with great content and then passing customers on to a site where they can buy what they've just researched.

The New EcommerceWe see the New Ecommerce merging Cnet and commerce to build sustainable online community. But there's a problem. Either of those missions is a full-time job - commerce, content or community. Merchants will need to delegate content creation to trusted members of their community and find ways to merchandise content and commerce more seamlessly than ever before.

The new Moon-Audio.com begins the move toward sustainable online content, commerce and community by clearly signalling THIS IS A STORE. Soon we hope to increase the signal to THIS IS A STORE WHERE YOU CAN LEARN TOO and finally THIS IS A COMMUNITY WHERE YOU CAN BUY AND LEARN.

Mashing up, curating and listening are the new skills needed to be a successful online merchant. No ecom site is GREAT at content, commerce and community...yet. Moon-Audio.com will fire on all three ideas over the next few months. Stay tuned.

Great Hubspot list of free tools. One caveat. There is no free lunch. Most of these tools are using a "freemium" model. They develop a robust tool and then give away a stunted version free in the hope they will hook users enough they pay to continue using the tool.

Most freemium models know where their marketing sweet spot resides. They will and can provide value. As you scale you will need to upgrade or lose your investment. Free tools require a learning curve too.

Smart move is to have the free tool be so simple anyone can use it. That limits any tool's ability to do more advanced things. "More advanced things" only happens every now and then, so never buy a tool for "every now and then".

Do protect your investment. If you learn a tool well enough to be comfortable with its use and it provides value AND you've outgrown the free version upgrade assuming the ASK isn't out of line with the market. The tricky thing to know is when to JUNK your time investment and move on and when to double down.

No hard and fast rules for "junking" a tool and moving on, but here are reasons I leave tools I've previously invested in:

* They don't listen or care about my input. * They don't champion how my team and I are using their tool (see Haiku Deck's Featured and Popular galleries for great examples of SUPPORT for use of their tool).

* No easy to tap Applications Program Interface (API). * The upgrade costs are not aligned with perceived benefits. * Something easier, better and cheaper came along. * Something more technically advanced was invented.

Those last two points are connected. Money isn't usually the most important of first consideration when thinking about tools that we use. We don't pay for enterprise level tools (say $30K a year and up), so everything is between $300 and $2K a year.

Biggest reason we change is something new creates efficiencies or is more aligned with our ideas and philosophy. Don't think your ABOUT page matters? Yeah you wluld be WRONG about that (lol).

If you are using or do use any of HubSpot's free design tools please report back as most are new to us.

Web designers shouldn't be SEO experts since keeping up with DESIGN is a full-time job. Nothing has made that truth more apparent than my first week learning CSS, SCSS and the like at The Iron Yard Code Academy in Durham, NC this week.

But web designers are where SEO rubber meets the Google Road so understanding a handful of ideas is critical to the online success of any designers creations. This deck was created to share with The Iron Yard's Cohort 3 Front End Engineering class Friday January 16th.

Includes our favorite FREE SEO tools and how we use them. Good luck and let us know your SEO / Design experience and we will curate into an upcoming post on http://www.curagami.com.

This time last year I made 7 predictions for web design in 2014, with mixed results (I’m looking at you SVG). This year, I’ve sought out 10 web design trends you'll actually see:

1. Lettering2. Goodbye to IE3. Micro-design4. The Internet of no thing5. Mobile video 6. The decline of framework dominance7. The beginning of the end for the old guard8. Art direction9. Pooled analytics10. SVG will (finally) take off

Martin (Marty) Smith's insight:

Great post here and agree with every one of these 10 trends especially the glee in discontinuing support for IE 6 and IE7. Sounds like even Microsoft is about to turn away.

How I Use Haiku Deck I use Haiku Deck when I know what I think I know and when I'm trying to discover what I DON'T KNOW. When I know what I think I know, and what Internet marketer can ever really KNOW anything, I use Haiku Deck as a visual marketing tool. Haiku' shortens my "elevator pitch" and matches storytelling Ted-like visuals.

When I don't know what I don't know I use Haiku Deck too. Working on a "business plan" right now and using Haiku to suggest hings I may not have considered. Their search is so targeted AND VISUAL it helps when I am this far up the funnel. Google and refinement will come later.

Really like the Haiku Deck team too. They created a great example of HERO MARKETING with their Featured and Popular galleries. .Any POINT OF AGGREGATION is more powerful than any individual (these days) as we discussed re: +The Huffington Post, so Haiku's intelligent move was to create a Featured and Popular gallery. Those two initially highly curated spaces moved the team from creators to curators.

The PaigeRank 5 they've earned is proof of the power of the community (since most SaaS sites earn about a PR2 or 3). By aggregating their users content they kill two birds with a single brilliant stroke - they create proof cases more powerful than whitepapers AND they provide a home for a constantly changing amount of COOL content THEY didn't have to create.

Love this tool as it shows so many of my favorite #webdesigning and #marketing ideas. Let me know when you create your first deck and I will be sure to share across my social nets :). Marty

Thanks to Haiku Deck for making 7 Reasons You Must Curate Content a Honorable Mention in their top decks of the year post too!

Design Is RevolutionaryDon't have to be Steve Jobs to know design is revolutionary. Our Web Design Revolution feed on Scoop.it is one of our favorites. We love THINKING visual because most of us (save one poor CTO) are marketing geeks who visualize in our sleep.

If you visualize in your sleep consider contributing a Scoop or two or three to The Web Design Revolution in 2015. Several easy ways to contribute:

1. If you are on @Scoop.ituse the Suggest Feature. We appreciate all the great suggestions we've already received and promise a new focus on collaboration in 2015.

2. If you aren't on Scoop.it you are missing one of the best "do less, get more" tools we know, but you can still contribute ideas for stories we should include by:

Call For Help NOWRight now we are interested in creating a year-end mashup of all the web design predictions for 2015. If you have a favorite prognosticator and they write about what they think is going to happen in web design next year send us the link and we will mash your contribution up into a summary with early views going to contributors.

Thanks for a great year and hope you will contribute to The Revolution in 2015.

Gary Marshall shares 50 of the best free web tools to help build your site, from well known tools as WordPress and Drupal through to some you may have never considered

Martin (Marty) Smith's insight:

Lots of "new to us" tools on this comprehensive list of free tools to use in web design. "Free", in some cases, means freemium or you get to start for free and need to upgrade for more advanced features. Nothing wrong with this "try and get addicted" model since you don't invest in tools that don't get traction.

Haiku Deck Zuru uses the power of artificial intelligence to transform your ideas into polished presentations. Become a charter member to get 6 months free.

Marty NoteHaiku Deck is one of my favorite visual marketing tools. Our 41 "decks" have generated more than 100,000 views. We got the idea about slides being a new marketing channel by working with this magic wand of a tool.

Now they've got something new up their sleeve and the entry fee is a whopping $30 bucks (lol). Let's see, 100K views for $30 bucks, we signed up today and suggest you do the same. Whenever their new tool comes out of beta we know it will be worth many multiples of $30 bucks :). M

In this article, Kendra Schaefer examines the things all web professionals should know before swan-diving into the Chinese market, including how mobile-only social platforms have become the revolutionary new frontier of Chinese web design, and who’s designing beautiful websites in China today.

Martin (Marty) Smith's insight:

Cool post. China is ahead of us on MOBILE leaving "Mobile First" for "mobile only" and they take more web design risks that pan out more often than you think.

Updated! Some of the web's smartest thinkers reveal what they believe will transform the web.

Summary & Marty Notes

1. Huge Background Images (Agree, but hard to do well in responsive design). 2. Card Based Design (Agree and need to know more about this since cards = responsive and responsive i.e. platform agnostic is the way to go now). 3. Digital First Branding (Agree and this will be a big shift for many who think of their websites as additions not the MAIN THING).

4. Open Data (Need to know more about this).5. Responsive Design...Evolved (Agree, Agree, Agree). 6. Privacy (not sure about this one, think that ship has sailed). 7. Isomorphic Java Script (Need to know more about this). 8. Iteration (Agree, we will make MVPs, ship them and then watch and improve them). 9. Vibrant Design (not sure about this one, the example made my eyes hurt). 10. Web Components & Adaptive Design (this is Internet of Things and I agree).

Cyber-Duck are an award winning London digital Web Design agency. We can offer a full professional service from web design to programming web technologies

Martin (Marty) Smith's insight:

As these examples show better than thousands of words can responsive web design is about more than design. How you architect your information to handle the accordion nature of phones, pads, lap and desktops is paramount. Figuring out how to snippetize everything from images to written content is the new challenge.

This post is important and valuable on two fronts. First we all need to start thinking MOBILE FIRST and that is a very different way to think. Second the great list of new to me tools is worth a scan and test.

When In Doubt AskAlejandro Aravena makes it clear participation isn't easy, but the advantages of including those you server IN the decision process far outweigh the pain. Aravena is asking about housing and public space.

Internet marketers and ecommerce teams need to be asking about changes to their "public space" - their websites. The synthesis between designers and community discussed in this TED talk become a model for web design too with lessons like:

* Don't try to defeat natural forces (Google) incorporate them.

* Build flexible frameworks customers can modify.

* Individual expression happens.

That last bullet my represent the hardest transition for most web designers. We are so used to drawing boxes within boxes we forget those boxes are meant to serve PEOPLE. Hard to forget when those people are included, consulted and actually listened to all along.

Look at what has already happened. We created a web o one way communication that was modified, cloned and spun back to us by the social web as two way community. Why so much resistance to two way community?

Lack of perceived control may be the culprit. Learning to love the friction of Aravena's "synthesis" requires placing ego firmly in back pocket and listening. Who wants to do that?

The future of web design TURNS on our ability to adapt many of the architectural principles Aravena discusses so articulately in this excellent TED Talk. He may be discussing buildings in Chile, but he could be discusses our client http://www.Moon-Audio.com.

The future is about a building a DIFFERENT kind of framework one that encourages a growing number of Ambassadors willing to sacrifice to stamp their impression on YOUR web design.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.